Author(s): Gregory Brian Pasternack
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Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: Rivers of all size and landscape position are threatened by anthropogenic impacts. Despite well-meaning attempts to improve rivers through flow and landform manipulations, many projects are little more than further, harmful anthropogenic disturbance. Use of the scientific method for design hypothesis testing is essential for advancing restoration methods and monitoring ecological outcomes. Within the scientific context, predictive ecohydraulic analysis is a useful tool for characterizing baseline river conditions, vetting competing restoration designs, and evaluating post-project performance. Near-census analysis, the approach of evaluating meter-scale spatial patterns as well as traditional statistical metrics, is now essential to ecohydraulics, because ecological functionality hinges on specific linkages in landscape variability, not overall central tendency. As near-census ecohydraulic analysis reveals more about the spatial structure of ecological functionality and its temporal dynamics, design tools, such as the Synthetic River Valley platform, can incorporate those lessons with more river-variability functions. Finally, the future of ecohydraulics will need to expand out of the channel and onto the floodplain, which is presently the least understood domain ready for ecohydraulic investigations.
Year: 2018